Relevant to current discussions on the talkshop concerning changes in Earth’s length of day (LOD) and the effect of planetary orbital resonances on the Moon’s orbital parameters and Earth climatic variation; this is a repost from Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate-Connection website. Ian very generously opens with a hat tip to this blog, (at which he is one of the ‘collaborators’ he mentions).

[(*) Some of the findings in this blog post concerning the connection between the Earth’s rotation rate and the planetary configurations have also been independently discovered by Rog “Tallbloke” Tattersall and his collaborators]

A. The Connection Between Extreme Pergiean Spring Tides and Long-term Changes in the Earth’s Rotation Rate as Measured by the Rate-of-Change of its Length-of-Day (LOD). (*)

If you plot the rate of change of the Earth’s Length of Day (LOD) [with the short-term atmospheric component removed] against time [starting in 1962] you find that there is a ~ 6 year periodicity that is phase-locked with the 6 year period that it takes the lunar line-of-nodes to re-align with the lunar line-of-apse [see the first note directly below and reference [1] for a description of the method used to determine the time rate of change of LOD].

NB: The pro-grade precession of the lunar line-of-apse once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 8.8504 Julian years (J2000) while the retrograde precession of the lunar line-of-apse line-of-nodes once around the Earth with respect to the stars takes 18.6000 Julian years (J2000). Hence, the lunar line-of-apse and the ascending node of the lunar line-of-nodes will realign once every:

Lozier, Susan (2010). Deconstructing the conveyor belt. Science 328, 1507-1511.http://sites.duke.edu/mslozier/files/2010/11/Lozier_2010.pdf
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Though appealing in its simplicity, the ocean conveyor-belt paradigm has lost luster over the years […] the ocean’s eddy field, unaccounted for just decades ago […] figures prominently in the dismantling of the conveyor-belt paradigm. Another player in this dismantling is the ocean’s wind field. The traditional assignation of surface ocean gyres to wind-forcing and overturning to buoyancy forcing has ignored the vital impact of winds on overturning pathways and mechanics. […] the conveyor-belt model no longer serves the community well […] because it ignores crucial structure and mechanics of the ocean’s intricate global overturning.

[…] wind forcing, rather than buoyancy forcing, can play a dominant role in changing the transport of the overturning […]

I may be boring folks yet detail is what breaks to understanding. This is rather fun, things fit.

UK extremes

Parameter

Location

Value

Highest maximum temperature

Gravesend

14.1 °C

Lowest maximum temperature

Pennerley

5.7 °C

Lowest minimum temperature

South Newington

-2.0 °C

Highest rainfall

Redesdale Camp

19.8 mm

Sunniest

Leconfield

6.0 hours

Issued at: 2303 on Tue 04 Nov 2014

Hourly data, a peak temperature which elsewhere seems to coincide with a short period of high visibility, probably sunshine. But look at the green wind data trace, falling west wind, calm, east wind then resume west. Humidity drops low. The station is on a tidal estuary.

The estimate tide from various web sites at Gravesend-Broadness was low tide at 16 hours but the PLA chart for Tilbury which is 2km downstream is 0.76 m @ 17:10 hrs

Prolific solar-planetary scientist and long-time talkshop friend Nicola Scafetta has a new paper published in Physica A entitled ‘Global temperatures and sunspot numbers. Are they related? Yes, but non linearly. A reply to Gil-Alana et al. (2014)’ which comments on Gil-Alana et al 2014; a paper purporting to dismiss any correlation between solar activity and terrestrial surface temperature. Nicola gently points out the limitations of their methods and patiently explains how the astronomical-solar signal can be found in the data. Here is Figure 3 to whet your appetite:

Fig. 3. (A) Annually solved HadCRUT3 global surface temperature record [34] from 1850 to 2013. (B) Power spectrum density functions calculated using the MEM method (using M = N/2 = 82) and the MTM periodogram f (p) [35,36]: the calculations were made with the SSA–MTM Toolkit. Several spectral peaks (e.g.: at about 9.1, 10.4, 20 and 60 yr) are statistically significant above the 95% confidence level, and their solar, lunar and astronomical origin is explained in the literature (e.g.: Scafetta [10,32,33,25]).

Nicola also provides plots of several of the various solar and temperature related indices and techniques for representing them over a wide range of timescales which clearly demonstrate the plain fact of the close coherence between the activity of our host star which supplies all our energy, and the fluctuations of the lovely moderate temperatures we live in on the surface of our planet.

While browsing Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate Connection blog, I found a graphic showing the coincidence of El Nino with the alignment of the Lunar line of nodes (declination cycle) and line of apse (orbital precession), with the Sun. I’ve taken the liberty of adding my Solar – El Nino hypothesis to it: the proposal is that El Nino tends to be initiated as the cycle starts to decline steeply and initiated again at solar minimum as it ‘bottom’s out’. I’ll reproduce Ian’s accompanying text below the break but to get to the point, here’s the result:

I’m of the opinion that before getting into the complexity of numerical modelling, it’s wise to put considerable effort into trying to understand the physical processes at work in the climate system, and the origins of the energy flows that drive them. David Evans’ recent series of posts over at Jo Nova’s site have generated a lot of interesting discussion (despite being roundly ignored by Anthony Watts at WUWT), and I think we can shed some light on the ‘mysterious 11yr lag’ between solar input and climate response.

This is a major new paper published in the March issue of prestigious journal ‘Solar Physics’ by solar-planetary theorists Ken McCracken, Jurg Beer and Friedhelm Steinhilber, which makes a newer and more extensive analysis of planetary motion in relation to the Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10 Glactic cosmic ray proxies than the 2400 yr Hallstat cycle study we looked at yesterday. The paper has been in the works a long time (submitted in July 2012), achieving final acceptance in late February this year. I can’t make the whole paper available due to copyright restrictions, but the abstract gives a clue as to the content. I’ve added one of the figures up to help convey some of the more important results. I’ve also appended the bibliography, as this isn’t part of the paper’s main text, it’s great to see Geoff Sharp and Ian Wilson getting citations. We can discuss other parts of their paper in comments. Boy is Martin Rasmussen going to look stupid in the future, by axing PRP for publishing our solar-planetary special edition.

While giggling about the botched “Death blow” dealt by Anthony Watts and other members of team wassup to our solar-planetary theory yesterday, it occurred to me that the rather thin rolled-up paper they tried to bludgeon Nicola Scafetta with only considered the all too brief thermometer record. No wonder Sverre Holm found his windows too narrow to see the big picture through, as Nicola Scafetta pointed out in a comment deleted by Anthony Watts. When considering climate swings on the timescale of interest, in this case, around 60 years, we need to look at longer records.

A paper we discussed a few days ago used a paleoproxy to compare millennial scale changes in terrestrial climatic indicators with Steinhilber et al’s 2009 10Be proxy reconstruction of TSI (Total Solar Irradiance). Their work is sufficiently detailed to be able to discern sub-centennial swings in these climatic and solar indicators. Here’s panel ‘d’ of their figure 2, which I’ve annotated with vertical lines marking peaks in the curves.

Climate Wars – CO2 vs. Solar in the Battle to Lay Claim to Jet Stream Anomalies
By Jaime Jessop – 23-2-2014
Mat Collins of Exeter University admitted to the world a week ago that the direct cause of the UK’s wet and windy winter was/is the North Atlantic Jet Stream. It has been directly responsible for the ‘conveyor belt’ of powerful storms which have hit the UK, one after another, in seemingly endless succession, since December 2013 all the way into February of this year. The rain precipitated by those storms has resulted in widespread river flooding.

In addition, a particularly deep depression which coincided with a very high tide on the 5th/6th December also resulted in fairly severe coastal flooding along eastern coastal areas. Nothing as bad as the devastating tidal surge of 1953 but that was more down to massively improved flood defences in the last 50 years. The Dec 2013 tidal surge was probably only a shade less menacing in terms of actual sea level rise than was the 1953 event. Severe gales and storm force winds have also driven huge waves over sea defences in Wales and the West Country, resulting in yet more localised flooding.

All this chaos due to the Jet Stream, due to the run of extreme weather caused by that Jet Stream. But, given the exhaustive news coverage and the opportunity for a propaganda coup, it was inevitable that the proponents of CO2 induced global warming would figure out some way to link in the storms with ‘climate change’ and, right on cue, up stepped Julia Slingo to claim that ‘all the evidence’ pointed to a link between the UK floods and ‘climate change’.

I came across this recent paper on Arxiv (also published in MNRAS) which nicely confirms some of the work we have been doing in PRP on energy exchange in the solar system via mean motion resonance. Team wassup refer to this well known phenomenon (Observed by Galileo and derived by Laplace) as ‘numerology’. Climate computer games modeler Chris Colose calls it “third rate crank science”. :)An earlier 2010 paper finds a fourth planet in the system as part of the resonant coupling.

Dynamical analysis of the Gliese-876 Laplace resonance

J. G. Marti, C. A. Giuppone, C. Beauge (Submitted on 28 May 2013)

The existence of multiple planetary systems involved in mean motion conmensurabilities has increased significantly since the Kepler mission. Although most correspond to 2-planet resonances, multiple resonances have also been found. The Laplace resonance is a particular case of a three-body resonance where the period ratio between consecutive pairs is n_1/n_2 near to n_2/n_3 near to 2/1. It is not clear how this triple resonance can act in order to stabilize (or not) the systems. The most reliable extrasolar system located in a Laplace resonance is GJ876 because it has two independent confirmations.

Pierre Gosselin over at the excellent Germany based ‘No Tricks Zone’ has a hot story on the sudden shutdown of journal ‘Pattern Recognition in Physics’ by Martin Rasmussen of Copernicus (The innovative science un-publishers). He’s found a screen capture of the PRP website frontpage before the spurious excuses for the closure were added to create a figleaf for this profoundly anti-scientific and illiberal action:

The original motivation behind Copernicus Publishing director Martin Rasmussen’s decision to shut down the new journal Pattern Recognition Physics had nothing to do with the alleged “nepotistic” behavior among editors and peer-reviewers, but appears to have had all to do with politically incorrect questioning of IPCC orthodoxy. You can see how Rasmussen’s accusations appeared on PRP on the morning of January 17, 2014 at Bigcitylib.blogspot.com.

Around ten days ago I made an enquiry to Copernicus (the innovative science unpublishers) asking when they would be billing me for the order I made at the end of 2013. It turned out they had forgotten to do so, and they provided an invoice for a fresh order on Jan 27, 10 days after they axed the journal.

Astronomers have found a giant magnetic loop stretched outward from one of the stars making up the famous double-star system Algol. The scientists used an international collection of radio telescopes to discover the feature, which may help explain details of previous observations of the stellar system.

“This is the first time we’ve seen a feature like this in the magnetic field of any star other than the Sun,” said William Peterson, of the University of Iowa.

The pair, 93 light-years from Earth, includes a star about 3 times more massive than the Sun and a less-massive companion, orbiting it at a distance of 5.8 million miles, only about six percent of the distance between Earth and the Sun. The newly-discovered magnetic loop emerges from the poles of the less-massive star and stretches outward in the direction of the primary star. As the secondary star orbits its companion, one side — the side with the magnetic loop — constantly faces the more-massive star, just as the same side of our Moon always faces the Earth.

Brilliant Czech researcher P.A. Semi has sent us the fruits of some considerable labour, which he has asked us to share with the Solar-planetary community. Since the venue at Pattern Recognition in Physics was axed by Copernicus (The Innovative Science un-PublisherTM), he says he is not sure where to get this published, so the Talkshop it is for now. I will also add it to the repository I am building at ‘Solar System Science’, a new venture I’m setting up in collaboration with other researchers. Tim Channon will be interested in working with the dataset which can be generated from the resources Semi has provided, and I’m sure others will be too. Here’s a sample of the output:

Semi Writes:

Hello Tallbloke and others.

I’ve produced the Synoptic map of Sunspots 1874-2012 and Interpolated Sunspot Area, that allows to investigate sunspot record without smoothing, while removing the 27-day false signal of single-face problem another way – by interpolating individual Sunspot groups: if they can be matched on the next rotation, they are linearly interpolated to the new position and size, if they are not matched, they are interpolated in 17 days linearly to zero. This way, the far-side Sunspots are interpolated and the record does not need the usual monthly smoothing, that wipes away precise timings. (There still exists some single-face problem – the Sunspots, appearing on the far side first, are delayed until they get to the front side, and the 17-day fade-out makes a typical fade-out curves in the chart, but still better than if the group disappeared abruptly on the limb…)(more…)

Abstract

The classical Maximum Density data of 65 Torneträsk trees from years 441-1980 AD are studied in millennial, centennial and volcanic scales. The millennial scale is analyzed applying a specific filtering method. In that scale, the climate is cool after 1200-1400 AD. This more or less steady period is suggested to be due to volcanic episodes, which reduced the northward heat transport in the North Atlantic. The century scale variation, on the other hand, is suggested to be due to internal oscillations in sea surface temperature (SST) and to be connected to variations in the Arctic sea ice. Specifically, these oscillations have caused an additional warming and cooling trend in Northern Fennoscandian temperatures before and after 1930’s, respectively.

Variations in the temperature estimates are explained by the results for different temporal scales. All of them show local impacts leading to differences when compared with hemispheric estimates. The long-term estimate of the temperature as derived from the present Torneträsk data is found to be biased. The source of that is unknown.